Every Father’s Day, I call my father. We talk about family, work and whatever else is filling our lives that week. I spend part of the day thinking about the gifts he gave me and the sacrifices he made to provide them.
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But Father’s Day has also taught me to think about other men — not because they replaced my father, but because they helped him. Looking back, I realize they were not competing with my father for influence; they were multiplying it.
The truth, for many of us, is that we are raised by more people than our parents.
One of the first faces that comes to my mind belongs to a man who volunteered as an assistant scoutmaster when I was young. He was no relation to me, and nothing obliged him to be there. He had children of his own and plenty of demands on his time. Yet weekend after weekend, and Monday evening after Monday evening, he gave himself to boys from other families.
He taught us how to camp, how to solve problems without panicking, and how to carry our share of a common load. He was a high school math teacher, and on many evenings he sat with me at our scout meetings, long past when most busy men would have left, working through proof after proof until each one became clear to me.
The equations themselves are gone from memory, but what stayed with me is the image of a tired man choosing to remain at that table with a boy who was not his son.
The older I get, the more I realize how little of who I am was built alone.
As a child, I didn’t fully appreciate that gift. As a father, I am in awe of his kindness. Every hour he gave me and the other scouts was an hour he could have spent on his own family or his work. He gave it anyway.
There were others. As a teenager in Houston, I spent time around engineers and scientists who took a boy’s curiosity seriously. They showed me how to set up growing pods in their labs, answered endless questions, and sometimes brought me along to lunch with the engineering team.
At the time it felt ordinary. Only later did I see how generous it was for accomplished adults to make room at the table for a teenager and treat his interests as worth their attention. Such moments accumulate. They become confidence, then ambition, then eventually a self.
None of them behaved as though they were doing anything extraordinary. That is usually how formation happens — not in dramatic interventions, but in the quiet faithfulness of ordinary people.
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When we are young, we imagine that we make ourselves. Age corrects the story. The older I get, the more I realize how little of who I am was built alone. My parents deserve enormous credit, but so do the teachers, coaches and mentors who invested in me when they did not have to.
The value of mentorship
That realization changed how I understand my own obligations. When I was younger, I thought of mentorship as something I received. Now I think of it as something I owe. The right response to a gift like that is gratitude — and the next response, after gratitude, is imitation.
I try to practice that imitation now. Nearly two decades in a college classroom have taught me that the moments that matter are rarely the lectures. They are the ones at the edges; the student who lingers after class with a question really about something larger, or the high schooler who emails out of the blue and needs an adult to take a half-formed ambition seriously. When I go out of my way for them, I am not being generous. I am paying back something I can never quite repay.
My own Jewish tradition makes a claim, in the Talmud, that has always struck me as both demanding and generous: whoever teaches another person’s child, the sages said, is regarded as though he had fathered that child himself. The work of forming a child is not the parents’ alone; anyone who takes it up joins the family.
The most important things are rarely broadcast. They are handed from one person to the next – parent to child, teacher to student, neighbor to neighbor. Adults invest in children not their own; those children grow up and invest in the next generation. Knowledge and character move forward one link at a time. There is something almost sacred in it; a quiet act of faith that what we were given was worth keeping, and worth handing on.
We often speak of inheritance as something material – property, savings, a treasured collection, the items in a will. But the inheritances that matter most cannot be written into any document. Patience. Integrity. Curiosity. Responsibility. Faithfulness. They are handed down person to person, by those willing to spend themselves on someone younger.
I see the same thing beginning in my children’s lives. A teacher who goes the extra mile with my daughter because her questions are worth answering. A coach who expects more of my son than my son expects of himself. I did not arrange these people. They appeared, the way mine did, and took an interest no one required them to take.
I don’t take for granted that they will keep appearing. Still, I find myself thinking far less about the worry than about the gift. My father gave me life. A good many others – men and women both – helped teach me how to live it.
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